A hundred
new and definite desires and hungers awoke in him. He began to want to talk
with people, to know men and most of all to know women, but the disgust for
his fellows in the town, engendered in him by Sarah Shepard's words and
most of all by the things in his nature that were like their natures, made
him draw back. When in the fall at the end of the year after the Shepards
had left and he began living alone, his father was killed in a senseless
quarrel with a drunken river man over the ownership of a dog, a sudden, and
what seemed to him at the moment heroic resolution came to him. He went
early one morning to one of the town's two saloon keepers, a man who had
been his father's' nearest approach to a friend and companion, and gave
him money to bury the dead man. Then he wired to the headquarters of the
railroad company telling them to send a man to Mudcat Landing to take his
place. On the afternoon of the day on which his father was buried, he
bought himself a handbag and packed his few belongings. Then he sat down
alone on the steps of the railroad station to wait for the evening train
that would bring the man who was to replace him and that would at the same
time take him away. He did not know where he intended to go, but knew that
he wanted to push out into a new land and get among new people. He thought
he would go east and north. He remembered the long summer evenings in the
river town when the station master slept and his wife talked.
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